And so marketing intelligence agency Pear Analytics told us today what we already know all too well: that the social media microblogging network Twitter is made up of 40% babble. This is actually very charitable. I have to confess that well over 99.9% of my own tweets are a unedifying mix of social dribble and babble - indecipherable to the uninitiated and embarrassingly vapid even when understood by other Twitter babblers.

But Twitter isn’t cornering the market in dribble-babble. Facebook,which is trying to outdo Twitter in real-time messaging, is a
frustratingly user-unfriendly social media website which is also
generating an avalanche of daily narcissism, titillation and stupidity.
And even the Internet’s supposedly more authoritative sites are not
immune to social media’s descent into user-generated inanity. Take, for
example, the garish Huffington Post, a
supposedly “news” website that aggregates the opinions of left-liberal
friends of Arianna Huffington, the Southern Californian socialite
founder of this venture capital backed yet still unprofitable new media
business.